Essay on ”Race, Class, Violence and Denial: Mass Murder and the Pathologies of Privilege” by Tim Wise

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Essay on ”Race, Class, Violence and Denial: Mass Murder and the Pathologies of Privilege” by Tim Wise

Often when racial inequality and discrimination is being discussed, we get to think of terms such as “white privilege” and American history with the Civil Rights Act in 1964. But we think of it, mainly as history. And that, according to Tim Wise, an anti-racism activist and American writer, is the biggest self-deception of the modern American world. Throughout an article posted on his own webpage, concerning school shootings, Tim Wise discusses the general American attitude towards this relatively new phenomenon in American society. With the use of especially pathos Wise argues that the most concerning thing about these events is how society is handling them afterwards. The problem is, according to Wise, that white people tell themselves ‘white lies’, and therefore never think that such actions could be taking place in their communities. He claims that there’s a reason why this happens in the outwardly ordinary societies. It’s because the people, trying to maintain at certain surface of innocence, refuse to see the signs of trouble, even when it’s going on before their very eyes. He wants us to take responsibility and stop excluding some parts of society from the “danger-zone” just because they look bucolic and normal on the outside and almost in the form of a provocative scolding he explains what damages these ‘white lies’ can do - not only to people of color, but to white people as well.

Tim Wise wrote this article 3 days after the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, where the 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot 20 pupils and 6 staff members. Without any further explanation Wise starts out his article, and from the very beginning he makes sure that the reader is attentive: “The senselessness alone would have been sufficient”(p.8 l. 7). We immediately sense the dramatic tone just as we also quite quickly understand the...

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